1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to routing requests from a plurality of connected clients to a plurality of connected servers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many situations arise in which a very large number of clients, possibly browsing the Internet, require access to a particular data source, such as a highly popular website. In order to serve data to many clients of this type, it is known to make the data available from many servers acting as a collection, with traffic management systems being used to even out loading in an attempt to optimise the available functionality.
Generally, this load balancing does not limit the number of connections to a server; instead, it simply maximises the number of requests across a set of servers.
A problem is encountered when the traffic management system receives a large number of simultaneous requests. By routing a large number of requests to a server, a concurrency threshold may be breached, and requests may become queued within a server until they can be allocated to a computation unit. In doing so, performance is reduced, as the servers must manage their queues whilst also serving the requests.